I love the Mac OS, but almost every day I come across little things about it that I think could be done better. This is the first of what will probably become an occasional series of suggestions for what could be improved in the Mac OS and other Apple software.

This time I’ll be looking at Quicktime and the Dictionary Widget.

Dictionary Widget

I’ve come to find Dashboard occasionally useful. I wouldn’t say that it’s changed the way I use my computer exactly, but it is sometimes very convenient. The dictionary widget is one that I’ve found useful, but it’s far from perfect.

First of all, the way text is rendered appears very strange. I don’t know why exactly, but it appears not to have been anti-aliased properly at all. In comparison with the beautifully rendered text in the rest of the OS the characters in the dictionary are very rough around the edges. It’s easy enough to read when set to ‘large’ but at smaller sizes it’s sometimes a struggle.

This is just one example of Apple’s generally poor graphical implementation of its widgets. Let’s hope it’s polished up in 10.4.2.

My second point with regards dictionary is more a suggestion than a complaint but it does seem to be an obvious feature for computer dictionaries. This was suggested to me by a friend (thanks, James) and Answers.com has it already: audio pronunciation guide. For some words (sadly not all seem to be covered) answers.com has a link to an audio file that will read the word for you. If this functionality were incorporated into the dictionary widget it would be extremely useful.

It shouldn’t even be that difficult to incorporate. Apple’s had ‘text to speech’ for a very long time and each dictionary entry already has a pronunciation guide in the form of the phonetic alphabet common to all dictionaries. All that would be required is a re-programming of text to speech to recognise and correctly pronounce the phonetic alphabet.

My last issue is with the content of the dictionary itself. It seems heavily Americanised with no option to use an ‘British English’ alternative. It would be nice if there were more localisation options.

Quicktime

I can’t quite bring myself to understand Apple’s attitude to the Quicktime player. In many ways it’s an excellent piece of software but a few small things are letting it down, and as I see it that’s a huge missed opportunity.

The way I see Quicktime is that - like iTunes and the iPod - it’s a little bastion of Apple in a Windows user’s world. As such it’s also an ambassador for Apple products in Windows land. Many people will base their entire opinion of Apple on the Quicktime player since it’s just about the only thing Apple makes that you’ll find on almost every Windows computer.

And it’s really not doing Apple justice. I hear this again and again from PC friends - ‘Quicktime’s so crap; it can’t even do full screen’. And they’re absolutely right. I know that there’s a fullscreen option in QT Pro, but really, should full screen be considered a Pro option? Apple’s missing an opportunity here, full screen’s such a small thing but it would help their reputation so much.

Then there’s another thing I’ve never been able to understand about Quicktime. Why doesn’t it let you save movies to disk from within a web browser. Again, I know there’s a Pro option that allows you to do this but why does Apple think that only media professionals need to save films from the web? This seems to me an option that everyone would use and it’s just really annoying for people that it isn’t there. Again, Apple is annoying people with what might be their only contact with an Apple product and as I see it that’s just stupid.